The Hollow Man
by exorcisingemily
Summary: The Fall of Arcadia. The end of the Last Great Time War. And the birth of a new man, who will always be defined by it. Very dark. The regeneration of the Eighth Doctor into the Ninth.


_"Those who have crossed_

_With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom_

_Remember us—if at all—not as lost_

_Violent souls, but only_

_As the hollow men_

_The stuffed men."_

Outside the TARDIS, Arcadia falls.

Two dozen Time Lords. Three billion Arcadians. A full armada of Daleks. A host of Nightmares. Outside, chaos reigns and a shining planet is rent asunder as inside he expels the golden dust of space and time into the air of his ship, like the ghost of breath in chilling cold but lit with the fires of creation. His body is racked with it, unfamiliar frame arcing up from cool grating as if sparked with electricity.

In truth, it's more like screaming, but his voice has left him now, consumed as everything was, burned hollow and reshaped, and he thinks he's forgotten how.

Outside, chaos reigns and Arcadia is reborn as he is.

The TARDIS, his stalwart friend, has planted herself in time and space. Beneath them the planet shifts, the vortex howls like a wolf in the darkness, and the battle resets like a board game, a child's stubborn unwillingness to admit defeat combined with a madman's callous disregard for life and death.

Outside, the war begins again anew and swarms over Arcadia, snuffing out its life.

Inside he sobs, his hands finding the grating like a scared child seeking out a hand to hold, his fingers lacing into the organic metal, his tears falling hissing into her coral below. Long fingers, now, with blunt nails and pale skin and knobby knuckles, but the grime still coats them, the ash of destruction and the blood of three billion innocents.

The TARDIS sits stationary, his shield, his home, his temporary sanctuary. She is pouring her lifesblood into this, into protecting this man who she's never met but who has been her friend for centuries. She's shielding him from the worst of it-the screams that have echoed in his mind now, again and again, she absorbs them, dimming them to a quiet roar.

Outside, beam disrupters shatter over her shielding, refracted and dispersed, adding to the chaos around them. Nightmares howl by, claws ineffectually skimming along her surface, looking for purchase and taking little but chips of worn cerulean paint for their trouble.

His legs unsteady, the man who was and may again some day be the Doctor pulls himself to standing, too horrified by what he's seen to care about trivial matters like appearance, or that he's alive despite what seem like his best attempts. He knows this day. He has lived this day again and again, and he knows it's his pride, his damndable inability to admit defeat, that have brought him here again.

He used to fancy himself something of a heroic figure. A man who would go back in time, who would reset reality, in order to save a planet like this, a people like the Arcadians. A man who would rip asunder the universe to stop the Daleks from exterminating every living being on a planet of three million peaceful sentient life forms. He was a man who would wield the power he had over others, the power to inspire, in order to convince them into his plans. Two dozen Time Lords, him at the front lines, he convinced them to do this the first time.

They were too late, standing in a war ravaged city that he remembered for its impossible beauty, for its triumphs of architecture and science, all overlayed on unspeakable horror. He looked at the bodies, the remains of the Dalek's ingenuity for clean, uncomplicated murder, he took in the tattered shells of bodies left by the Skaro Degradations who had never learned that refinement, and it was the Nightmare Child's hordes that finally broke him. Coiled creatures like sentient smoke, flashing eyes and wicked claws.

He saw one, its talons sunk into the temples of a child. The youth was at the age where it was already hard to tell gender, all awkward limbs and knobby joints and angular prepubescent lines. Under the tender ministrations of the Nightmare, all voice had fled and the color had drained from a face twisted in horror, eyes glazed and distant, body limp and lifeless. The child was dead already-all that remained was fear, carefully nurtured in the still firing synapses of a shredded brain, the twisting of a young psyche as much food to the creature as a means of reproduction. Soon his body would breathe the last of his terror into the air, black as smoke in a conscious mockery of a Time Lord's regeneration.

At first, he thought it was right. That this was what he was meant to bring to the war. Righteous fury and the declaration that it would never again happen as he severed the nightmare's connection and dissipated it with the force of his will and his telepathy, giving the child a few last moments of comfort and peace before he passed with a last ragged sob, clutched in the Doctor's arms.

He initiated the time loop, ripping them along their own timelines to deposit them back in their own personal histories, aware of the horrors that awaited. They were faster. They stopped it. When the Daleks tore through the first city, they were waiting. He fought back the Nightmares with his will and his anger and his love for these humans in their far-flung civilization-they needn't have a part in this war. They were chosen just for their ability to hurt him, collateral damage. And he saved them. Billions alive that could have been dead. Hundreds of Dalek ships destroyed, just detrious in orbit.

And then he found himself deposited back in his own personal timeline. Snatched back away from success. He'd introduced into the war its worst weapon, the greatest horror of all, and now either side could bend time to their will.

The planet cracks and breaks and smokes, the screams fall silent, and he feels it begin again. He feels time bend around him, breaking over the will of his TARDIS, her stationary position in time and space sheltering him just this once from the fallout. He doesn't know who won this time, who initiated the loop, who decided not to accept the outcome. Possibly one of his own people who saw him fall, saw the Nightmares descend like a storm cloud, even their limited sentience learning from the constantly repeating war, from their defeats, that it was him they needed to single out.

Or perhaps he was so far gone that his horror and fear shone like a beacon to them, calling them all down to him and his madness.

Now he was a new man, sheltered in a Time Ship that refused to allow him to be pulled along again, but he was as shredded as his tattered clothing. His psyche had been ripped apart as much as the child's had been, but centuries of stubborn will and training had made him tougher meat, made him a harder meal, saved him from the end. It was his skin that gave out first, like tissue paper, and he'd felt himself bleeding into the cracked earth, a life draining away, a new one boiling beneath his skin in golden energy.

He'd dragged himself to the TARDIS to die, and instead he'd lived. And she'd given him a choice.

Outside, the battle ends in the scream of a world dying, three billion minds calling out for him. Three billion minds that knew, again and again, that they had died before and were dying again and again in an endless loop. Because of his madness. Because he thought he was a god, who could fix it all.

Because he was a blasted fool.

Unfamiliar hands reach out to the TARDIS, ripped green velvet sleeves muddling his grip. He strips out of it, out of the blasted waistcoat, and works instead in his shirtsleeves, disgusted with the tattered trappings of a level of civility that was nothing but a lie in war like this one. He wasn't gentile. There was no place for Victorian era garb, like dress up or pretend play in a hell like Arcadia.

And he knew, now, that this was hell. He'd been naive. Even if it had worked the first time, they all remembered. They would all be haunted now by their deaths. And now, dying again and again and remembering it each time, they would never really be _human_ again, never with the hope and joy and fear and defiance that defined humanity across the stars. It hadn't been the Daleks or the Degradations or the Nightmares that had stripped them of that-they'd screamed their defiance and fought back, as well as they were able. It had been him that killed them, truly killed what made them, that had taken away what defined them.

Hands too rough on the TARDIS, he forces her to drop the psychic barriers, making himself listen to the screams in his mind. They're no longer defiant-they are despair. Fear. Hopelessness. This is no longer screaming, it is keening. And he did this to them. He wouldn't allow her to take this moment from him, no matter how well intentioned her protection. This was what he needed, what he needed to burn into his memory so that it would last regenerations, so that he would never escape the nightmares _he_ had wrought.

He was the Doctor. And in that moment he hated himself. Hated all of the versions of him that had brought him to that moment. All of the regenerations for whom this could be a faded memory.

And in that moment, wedged between other moments and stretched through time and space by the start of the loop, by the ripping and bending of the natural order, he makes his decision.

He started this. And he would finish it.

He knew the mechanics of the time loop intimately. He knew when it would be its weakest. He knew there would be no resistance from either side, that both sides would likely accept this as inevitable now, that whatever still living ranks of both likely were unaware who was even initiating it.

He knew the weak points, and he knew when to disrupt the loop and how, taking a mallet to the TARDIS controls with a lack of restraint that should have shocked him as he forced her to the breaking point.

And he broke time. Snapped the loop. The backlash burns out the mechanisms that made it possible, a catastrophic explosion in time and space. In his mind, he hears the last of it. A coronach for the people of Arcadia, a wailing dirge that ends in a whimper and silence that he would never shake from his mind.

The TARDIS, fixed in time, sits in the space where a shining planet used to be, surrounded by the floating pieces of a shattered armada, the empty husks of dead TARDIS and the wisps of Nightmares that play between, desperate for sustenance in the wake of a sector now dead of sentience, twisting between floating rock that carries with it pieces of a beautiful civilization.

Outside, Arcadia is dead and burned.

Inside, a new man sits on the jump seat of his TARDIS, staring blankly as the rotor rises and falls, hands fisted in torn velvet as he begins pulling together the shreds of his sanity. Passing a hand over hair that is shorter than it has ever been, he rises to his feet, numbly allowing them to lead him farther back into his home. By the time he emerges to the consul room again, he's donned drab wool and leather that would become his armor for the remains of this war, and strengthened his resolve.

He wanted to run. To find a place on the edge of the universe and forget the war, forget the horrors, forget the pain. But he didn't deserve that. He needed to remember. And he needed to end the war, whatever the cost.

He owed it to Arcadia.

That was the kind of man he was, now.


End file.
